A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Two Poems by Yasmin Mariam Kloth

Yasmin Mariam Kloth, USA-Egypt

 

Source

 

My parents grew up 

on an island in the Nile. 

On a map it’s the shape 

of a vessel docked 

in blue-green waters. On a map, 

the Nile flows North, the shape 

of a lotus flower, arms 

opening out to sea.

 

I took a boat once 

between Luxor and Aswan. 

There is no modern city 

in this stretch of water and land. 

How can there be

in a place where the river is older 

than pieces of the sky?

How can there be on these banks, 

where homes are sand, trees 

waiting for the wind?

 

I stood on the deck, watched old worlds 

float by. Men on feluccas 

in white cotton looked at me 

with the whites of their eyes. 

They were kings. 

They gave me riches 

with their smiles, their faces wrinkled 

by the sun, valleys of skin 

in the valley of the Nile. 

 

My parents didn’t raise me here. 

They brought their language, 

their food, their music, 

their hopes for family in luggage

unpacked in New York.   

I would not understand 

the source of what they left 

for many years.  

 

This is how I learned 

how the felucca travels. 

Light on water, 

with a sail to the wind. 

Banyan Song 

 

My grandmother 

made a home in the snow 

when she knew nothing 

of snow, transplanted from the shade 

of Banyan trees.

 

In the years after 

her husband died, her roots

grew low and dry.

She was easy to pluck

from her homeland, followed

children who’d already left

for new life.

 

I visited her there 

in her apartment in Montreal. 

Nothing had changed

in the years that expanded into spaces  

an ocean’s water could not fill. 

My daughter hugged her in the entry 

and she folded like a paper airplane 

at the waist.

She had never been someone’s 

great-grandmother before. 

This was too much love 

for her heart to give. 

 

The distance between 

their generations is not age. 

The distance is language and loss. 

The distance is the root 

of the Banyan tree, measured in meters 

from its leaves to the earth. 

 

My grandmother consumes 

this knowledge 

with a nose 

in my daughter’s hair. 

Yasmin Mariam Kloth writes creative nonfiction and poetry. Her writing explores love, loss, place and space, and has appeared in or been accepted by publications including Gravel, the West Texas Literary Review, The Tiny Journal, and the Willawaw Journal. Yasmin lives in Cincinnati, OH with her husband and young daughter.

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